Emotional Intelligence in Undergraduate Accounting Students: Preliminary Assessment

Abstract

There is a growing recognition among researchers and practitioners that the workplace is not the strictly cognitively-managed environment it was once assumed to be. Emotions play a large role in organizational life, and emotional intelligence (the ability to recognize, use and manage emotions) has become a skill that may allow accountants to perform better in a variety of areas such as leadership, client relations, and perhaps even decision-making. In addition, it is a skill that employers seem to value and that may be important to personal development as well. Thus, accounting education must attempt to inculcate emotional intelligence in its graduates in addition to technical knowledge. This paper investigates the level of emotional intelligence of accounting students using the MSCEIT, an instrument that measures ability rather than acquired competencies. The results show that the level of emotional intelligence of the students in the sample could be a concern. There is no evidence that one term of traditional accounting education can be expected to provide an opportunity for improvement. Thus, attempts to increase the emotional intelligence of the students may require targeted educational interventions.

Keywords:

• Emotional intelligence
• soft skills
• accounting students
• MSCEIT

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank Marie Hayes of the University of Maine for help with the MSCEIT. We should also like to acknowledge the financial support of the University of Maine Center for Teaching Excellence and the Maine Business School.

Notes

1. It must be noted that feeling emotions is not the same thing as emotional intelligence. An exercise such as McPhail's (2004) which causes subjects to feel strong emotions will not necessarily increase their emotional intelligence. Thus, the link between emotional intelligence and constructs such as ethics or judgment is not verified by the (so far) hypothesized link between these constructs and emotions.

2. The MSCEIT must be purchased from Multi-Health Systems, Inc. The company provides the instrument and scores it. The cost of the instrument was US$5 per test.